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Over at Zazzle, where users can customize hats, shoes, mugs, bags and a bunch of other products with their own original designs, there’s been a flurry of political T-shirt making. The result is a kind of user-generated commerce — which, like YouTube and other user video sites — creates a spectrum of results, from the top-notch on down (and down).

The 2008 election is spawning a kind of T-shirt arms race. A search on the site for Sarah Palin already yields more than 2,500 results. John McCain gets about 9,000, and Barack Obama about 20,000 (Joe Biden paraphernalia is in very short supply.)

“V.P. = Very Pretty” reads one shirt with a photo of Palin. “Omamma” says another. 

And showing how online T-shirt design is barely a half-step behind the blogosphere, current events-wise, there are already Zazzle shirts riffing on the “lipstick on a pig” nontroversy, and from both sides of the aisle. One simply says: “Palin: pig with lipstick” above the image of a big hog. Another declares, “This Little Piggy Likes Palin.”

Obama and McCain also have plenty of supporters and detractors. In a strike back against criticism of Obama for his stint as a community organizer in Chicago’s troubled neighborhoods: “Jesus was a community organizer,” argue the shirts. (Not everyone agrees.)

Obama also has a healthy number of funny shirts that don’t deify him quite so much, like the one that says “NO” and uses his famous campaign logo (with a red line through it) for the ‘O’.

Zazzle has actually organized T-shirts into “anti,” to make it easier to find shirts attacking the candidate you don’t like. 

McCain takes some good licks here. “No country for old men,” says one shirt. Another with a picture of the candidate’s face declares, somewhat ungrammatically, “Less Jobs, More Wars.” McCain has plenty of supporters too, but it has to be said that — at least judging by the shirts on Zazzle — they’re not as imaginative when it comes to slogans.  “McCain is my homeboy”?

Zazzle sells your T-shirt for you and gives you a meager 10% royalty — which doesn’t seem like much, given that you did all the hard work of coming up with a catchy slogan and typing it in to the Internet. It’s hard to see anyone making much money that way. Still, it’s fun to design your own shirts — here’s what I came up with after fiddling around with it for a few minutes. These puppies are going to go like hotcakes.